Then introduce Cartesian dualism and you have fundamental elements of the framework of the early modern worldview which was thought to be theoretically infinite and potentially all-knowing. But the problem with it is, there's no actual place in it for humans, as the observing mind has already been tacitly excluded from consideration. — Wayfarer

There is a place for the mind in Cartesian models , but as outside agent, for Descartes the divinely directed rational organizer of data, and for Kant the divinely directed organizer of ideas. If we bring the subject into more intimate relation with science, we run the risk of not going far enough , by retaining the divine origin of the contribution of consciousness to the nature of the world.
This keeps subjectivity at a distance from natural objects and thus remains a dualism.

To truly transcend dualism, we need to see perspectival relationality and valuative difference as inherent in nature at all levels, not just as emanating from ‘mind’.

You're trying to have your cake and eat it, presenting, as true, a theory about how the world is which within it claims that there are no absolutely true theories about how the world is. — Isaac

The old anti-postmodernist , anti-relativist chestnut rears its head:
‘How can the radical relativist claim that there is no objective truth, when their own claim is a truth claim?’

As a postmodernist , I am not saying forms of realism and naturalism are not ‘true’. They of course are true. That is , they discern intrinsic, context-independent objects , forces or forms. The world as they see it does indeed correspond or cohere with this model. Their model is true, correct , adequate to the terrain. As long as there is such a thing as a terrain , an intrinsic content, form , law, one has the chance of being true to it. But what if one believes, as do postmodernists like Deleuze, that the terrain is what it is by being the same differently? That when we utter the word ‘true’ and mean ‘correct’ , ‘adequate’, we are riding down a river, looking at the changing scenery and seeing this flow only as a fixed object? A simple correspondence between map and territory is revealed to be the product of a synthetic activity that ties together a multitude of changing differences and calls it ‘this fact’ over and over again even as ‘this fact’ continues to be the same differently.
It turns out that the territory is itself an endless series of maps.
At any rate, the question for the postmodernist who believes this insane idea is, what does it mean for you to believe it? Is it ‘true’? If truth needs a territory , a ground, an intrinsic , context-independent fact of the matter, then what does the postmodernist need?

The postmodernist doesn’t state a proposition about the world, they don’t mirror or represent. They perform a bit of theater, they enact, produce , transform. They utter words from within the interstices of assemblies of differentiating differences, rather than representing or observing from some vantage outside the multiplicity of differences. A conscious experience is shaped by, participates in and changes a multiplicity which is at the same time linguistic , unconscious, biological , social, political , physical and many other things.

The question the postmodern is asks is not ‘what is true’, but ‘what remains and what changes moment to moment’? The answer has to be repeated every moment as a performance. The answer for Deleuze , Heidegger and others is that the present is a an intersection of past and present such that the past appears as already changed by the present it enters into. My world from
moment to moment is foreign and familiar at the same time , familiar because it is a cobbling of my remembered history and the way the present changes it. It is also foreign in that it never reproduces a past.
Why can’t I say that I affirm this relation between memory and change as a metaphysical truth? The traditional concept of truth would seem to run afoul of an affirmation of the world that locates no fixed content of any sort , only a continually changing structure of past-present-future. Nothing remains settled , but must be reaffirmed , and reaffirmed differently, every moment. In one sense, the only thing that is true is the formal structure of past-present. In another sense, every content , every moment , is true in that a new ‘fact’ is produced, o my lasting for the moment of tis appearance as a new difference.


The postmodernist doesn’t tell the modernist their truths are untrue , they invite them to turn truths into theater, performance, to see the flow underneath the facts. The world is indeed as ordered as the empirical truths declare it to be , but it can be seen as even more intricately ordered than this. Belief in arbitrary intrinsically fixed facts hide that richer , more intimate order from us.

not just any convention will do. Only some of what one might say actually works. There is a way in which reality does not care what you say about it. Believe what you will, you cannot walk through walls.

I suspect you do not disagree with this. — Banno

Conservatives in the U.S. like to say that the facts of nature dont care about our feelings. All I would add to this is that this logic extends to feelings themselves, and to what we say about things. Put differently, our feelings dont care about our feelings, and what we say about things doesn’t care about what we say about things. Let me parse this seeming gibberish. ‘Not caring about’ refers to a certain independence. In a very general
sense, objective empirical models of the world don’t allow us to posit absolute independence of natural objects form each other. On the contrary, a causal interdependence reigns at all levels, from the quantum to the cultural. But alongside this interrelationality, empiricism posits facts internal to objects or forces, properties or attributes that survive the changing relationships among objects and forces. These inhering properties must be assumed to survive such interactions, because they determine the nature of the relationships , what kinds of patterns are possible. For an empiricist, this is as true in human psychology as in physics. Thus, ‘my feelings don’t care about my feelings’ means that empirical models of neuro-psychological function that rely on concepts of internal computation and representation believe that feeling and linguistic conceptualization are constrained and determined by intrinsic features of the brain that do not themselves change along with ( don’t care about) minute to minute changes in feeling or discursive understanding.
They may be context-sensitive but also are fundamentally context-independent. The underlying neurological principles of language and feeling don’t care about the contextual changes in feeling and linguistic expression.

This assumption of the context-independence of the facts of empirical psychology has important ethical implications. It justifies the politics of blame( irrationality, madness, bias, cognitive dissonance, sociopathology, brainwashing).

In differently ways, writers like Wittgenstein , Husserl, Heidegger, Derrida, Deleuze and Foucault focus on the empirical assumption of intrinsic properties that survive contextual changes in relationships.

What they propose is that every contextual relationship changes the ‘inherent’ properties of the elements that enter into the interaction. So
in a sense there are no inherences, no properties, only differences that make a difference, both to other elements and to themselves.

My aim in the following paragraphs is not to get you to agree with this , but to try and see if we can avoid the common objections to this ‘radical relativism’.

The first objection is that it is an attempt to deny or undermine science and its claims to effectiveness. Planes dont fall out of the sky , so science works, is one response.

The postmodern claim that intrinsic facts deconstruct themselves is not a critique of science in any traditional
sense of critique. It is not contradicting, denying , refuting, disproving or invalidating the assumption of internal properties , laws, forms. What is it doing is saying that our sciences already take into account the instability and movement at the heart of its intrinsic facts without knowing that it does so. If i point out a rock to you and tell you to stare at it for a while, you may tell me that it remained a rock for the whole time you were staring at it. What you don’t pay attention to is your changing eye movements, posture , attention, etc. Your behavior evinces the effects of an experience that is constantly changing, but in ways that are so subtle that they dont disturb the concept of ‘this same rock’.
Postmodernists argue that scientists are absolutely right when they say that there is a way that reality doesn’t care about how you model it, that reality is composed of
rocks , or forces, or laws with an intrinsic content that survives the contextual changes they enter into.

Postmodernists are just saying that ‘intrinsic’ , context-transcending content continues to be what it is the same way that the rock I stare at continues to be what it is, by changing continuously but very subtly.

So postmodernists are not really touching the results of the natural sciences, their predictions and laws. What they are doing is suggesting that the way of scientific progress is not via the fixing of laws and intrinsic properties bit of arranging and rearranging patterns of human relationship with the world in more and more
intricate ways. Yes, some of our attempts will work better relative to our goals than others, but the attempts that fail also contribute to this progress. The tendency of empiricism to nail down an arbitrary , intrinsic, irreducible, context-independent basis for natural objects and forces, those facts which dont care about the changes taking place around them ( or because of them), are the least interesting and least valuable aspect of science. This is what always threatens to turn science into dogma. Its most valuable quality is its ability to see process and relation within the arbitrary, the intrinsic , the lawful and the fixed.

The second objection to postmodern approaches to
science is that they destroy the usefulness of prediction by trying to rid the world of its stable foundations. But in the example I gave of staring at the rock, the subtle but continual shifts in the experience of something that we categorize linguistically as ‘this rock’ likely aren’t threatening to most scientists, except as a metaphysical curiosity. So what if every physicist who makes use of Einstein’s equations interprets their sense in a subtly different manner. As long as it doesnt affect their math, who cares? The language of physics handles this insignificant ambiguity in interpersonal understanding more than adequately. ( Of course , some within physics are pointing to new directions for the field that takes this ambiguity as a feature, not a bug).

The point isn’t just that the kind of instability postmodernists are pointing to within the founding facts and laws of the natural sciences doesn’t prevent science from working. It is that postmodern ways of thinking reveal what would be called the natural world to be less arbitrary and more intricately ordered than is seen within empirical approaches. This interrelational order was always the case, but science alters it to make it increasing more intricate. Planes don’t stay up in the air because of fixed facts of nature that were always the case before humans entered the picture. They stay up in the air because nature , which was always already finely ordered ( but not in a mathematically causal way) , continues to become more intricately relational because of the way humans change it with their science. Science is a human construction that achieves its effect by conceptually and physically altering the environment. We don’t simply find the order in nature, we manufacture it, in increasingly powerful and intricate ways. There are absolutely no fixed facts within or before the history of nature to make this possible , other than the recursive self-differentiating nature of nature.

truth only makes ense with regard to a particualr convention. After all it is statements that are true or false, and statements are conventions of language. You can say whatever you like, but only some of what you might say is of use. — Banno

Use is not necessarily the same thing as true. If a statement is a convention of language , then truth is a particular kind of conventional statement, which may differ from what is merely useful. A statement can be considered useful because it is true in the sense of corresponding with a state of affairs, or corresponding with facts supposedly external to the statement. Or it can be useful because it provides a way of organizing experience that is amenable to prediction and control. The predictive success of the statement, thanks to its underlying machinery of assumptions, need not be assumed to correspond to a state of affairs entirely external to it. Any particular statement and associated underlying paradigm may be assumed to be one of a potentially indefinite array of predictive vehicles, each of which may be ‘true’ of the same given event, that is , predictive, but in different ways. The different ways that a statement can be true would be a matter of HOW it organizes a set of events rather than a simple matter of correspondence between statement and event.

quote="Banno;711733"]the "convention" is what allows you to find your location with your iPhone. It's more than just a convention.[/quote]

The Einsteinian convention allows you to find your phone in a particular way. It works , not simply as true , but as true in its particular way of working. One could come up with a different way for a gps to work. This way wouldn’t be more true than the Einsteinian way, it would be a different way of being true.

I'm about half-way through the readings at this point. I only get to this stuff when I have the energy after getting life done, so I move at snails pace. Plus I'm a slow reader, anymore. — Moliere

Here’s something to add to your reading, Postmodernism
and our understanding of science. It’s a solid summary of one of the best representatives of postmodern philosophy of science, Joseph Rouse.


https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Hennie-Loetter/publication/281652523_Postmodernism_and_our_understanding_of_science/links/55f33b3508ae63926cf23bda/Postmodernism-and-our-understanding-of-science.pdf?origin=publication_detail

The GPS on my iPhone uses the equations of special relativity. Is that just a "linguistic convention and set of shared practices"?

That is the conceit of idealism: that all there is are such conventions. It disengages our narratives from the world. But it is only in their engagement with the world that these narratives are true or false. — Banno

True and false only make sense within a particular convention, that of truth as correctness and adequation with respect to a fixed external referent.
The concept of fixed external referent isnt a fact, it is a foregone conclusion and thus a starting point for most approaches to empiricism.
In other words, there is a hidden circularity at work here. It is the engagement of narratives with a world already articulated via such narratives that produces instances of truth and falsity. For alternative accounts of science practice, the aim of empirical investigation isnt truth as adequation but pragmatic usefulness in relation to the accomplishment of specified goals.

An airplane is designed to fly on the basis of specific aerodynamic engineering principles. Does this mean that only these principles will allow the plane to fly? If we were to imagine a history of flying machines extending indefinitely into the future and studied the evolution of their underlying engineering principles over the course of that history, what kind of pattern of change would we find? Would it be cumulative , with the earliest knowledge base being conserved and carried over into the subsequent modifications and improvements? Or would the evolution of the knowledge of flight be more like the periodic global realignment of an intricate tapestry or network of relations, maintaining a relative dynamic self-consistency in its overall form even as it undergoes continual mutations and transformations escaping any formula or algorithm?

You're saying that in this, our Age of Mechanism, we give precedence to the physiological, and treat first person data like some sort of foam on top?

When the two are actually bound by their relationship in the opposition? — Tate

I’m saying what we call third personal , like physiological concepts, and ‘inner’ concepts like sensation, are the same ‘stuff’, and by stuff I don’t mean substances , either objective or mental. What I mean is that all experiences are interactions that are neither purely subjective nor objective They are inextricably both perspectival and about something. Every experience is a performance or act that is personally situated as relevant to me in some way , and the introduction of an outside element.

How bout:

Sensation, physiologically, involves nervous system function.

Sensation, as the content of awareness, has properties that are absent from the physiological description. — Tate

Or:

Via intersubjective discourse, we construct concepts like physiological, biological, physical. Even though we treat them as though all traces of our conscious experience could be removed and they would remain as independent facts, they are inextricable from first personal experience.

Meanwhile , we treat concepts like the consciousness of sensation as though they were purely inner and ineffable substances or properties, the purely inner and subjective complement to the purely outer and objective physiological facts, a special seasoning added to objects.

The US conducted a protracted global holocaust in the wake of 9/11. There is no chance that that mindless murder does not work its way back in the form of children shooting other children in the face in school, en masse, among other things. — Streetlight

It can just as well work it’s way forward.

What's wrong with: brain activity is sensations? — bongo fury

The ‘is’ seems a little problematic to me, as if we were talking about absolutely equivalent senses of meaning. How do we know we are dealing with a brain? Brain implies a biological substance that we can experience together as a third person entity, and activity furthers specifies a functional, as opposed to anatomical, study of it though third peso. techniques of measurement. Sensation, on the other hand , is a first person experience of consciousness. We could try and correlate the third and first personal such as to come up with some sort of monism, but that ends up eliminating aspects of one or the other of the two vantages. If we were to say that the brain is a third personal concept that is generated within first person experience we could arrive at a way of keeping what is implied both by sensation and biological brain. Going in Dennett’s direction, on the other hand, and reducing sensation to third person brain process leaves out the situated perspectival basis of third person concepts like ‘brain’.

I just find it odd that rather then being seen as a resolution of a potential error (seeing the ship's length as a feature of the observer), Einstein's work is so often held up as proof that this is the case. — Isaac

Einstein’s work should neither be held up as the resolution of an error nor as proof of an error. Rather, it should be seen as an invitation to participate in a certain linguistic convention and set of shared practices.

You can only explain how things are - that is what one does (with language). And that is how things are. What we are all doing here is trying to explain how things are. Even in saying, "it's what one does" is explaining how things are. What is "It's" in the sentence, "It's what one does" if not "How things are is" what one does. — Harry Hindu

One can think of how things are in terms of dead physicalistic nature independent our interaction with it and interpretation of it , or how things are in terms of the way that we interpret things in relation to current context, the particular pragmatic sense and relevance a meaning has for us in relation to our present goals and circumstances. This second, pragmatic notion of how things are is dependent on what we do with things. How things are is a human constructive , productive, creative process, an activity , a doing, an interaction. Science from this vantage is forward looking production via discursive practice rather than backward looking knowledge and epistemology, a becoming rather than a mirroring and representation of pre-existing nature.

From my side, Banno's main influences are Wittgenstein, Davidson, Austin et al, who are influential in analytical philosophy. You could say they're the mainstream. My influences are more counter-cultural and (I think) more existential. I — Wayfarer

It depends on how Wittgenstein and Austin are read. Banno shies away from more ‘countercultural’ interpretations of these authors. Compare his readings, for instance , to that of Anthony Nickles. I would say that your existentialism is of a conservative religious variety , as opposed to the later Wittgenstein’s or Sartre’s
existentialism.

Here is a well-regarded book, The Nature of Necessity, Alvin Plantinga, which analyses many of the themes explored in this thread. ( — Wayfarer

Alvin Plantinga? :gasp: :grimace: :rage: :mask:

I ignore posts with wiki. — Jackson

Good for you. Then ignore the wiki quote and pay attention to my comments. My comment is that Lloyd is offering an interesting blend of determinism and indeterminism. What is deterministic about his model is that he begins from determined laws of physics to produce indeterminism. That’s why the predictions are probabilistic rather than inferential. Lloyd , like Turing, is subject to Wittgenstein’s critique.

According to Wiki,
— Joshs

don't care about wiki — Jackson

You think this is not what Lloyd is claiming? Would take me probably a half hour to confirm that this is exactly what he is claiming. Should I waste the half hour or do you think what I quoted sounds quite consistent with what you quoted from Lloyd?

From Seth Lloyd, a few years ago: "the only way to figure out what's going to happen in a computing system is to go through the computation." — Jackson

According to Wiki,

“In his 2006 book, Programming the Universe, Lloyd contends that the universe itself is one big quantum computer producing what we see around us, and ourselves, as it runs a cosmic program. According to Lloyd, once we understand the laws of physics completely, we will be able to use small-scale quantum computing to understand the universe completely as well. Lloyd states that we could have the whole universe simulated in a computer in 600 years provided that computational power increases according to Moore's Law.”

This is an interesting blend of deterministism and indeterminism. It is a determinism in that the laws of physics can be understood ‘completely’.

↪Joshs
Ok, but just tell me how the distinction helps us answer the question of free will? — punos

I tend to associate the term ‘free will’ with conservative approaches to moral philosophy like that of Peter Strawson ( or ). What Thompson has in mind is not this theological concept of free will. It is closer to Nietzsche’s view of the will:

“Consciousness doesn't cause itself, Will is neither free nor a Determinism: The causa sui is the best self-contradiction that has ever been conceived, a type of logical rape and abomination. But humanity's excessive pride has got itself profoundly and horribly entangled with precisely this piece of nonsense. The longing for “freedom of the will” in the superlative metaphysical sense (which, unfortunately, still rules in the heads of the half educated), the longing to bear the entire and ultimate responsibility for your actions yourself and to relieve God, world, ancestors, chance, and society of the burden – all this means nothing less than being that very causa sui and, with a courage greater than Munchhausen's, pulling yourself by the hair from the swamp of nothingness up into existence. Suppose someone sees through the boorish naivete of this famous concept of “free will” and manages to get it out of his mind; I would then ask him to carry his “enlightenment” a step further and to rid his mind of the reversal of this misconceived concept of “free will”: I mean the “un-free will,” which is basically an abuse of cause and effect. We should not erroneously objectify “cause” and “effect” like the natural scientists do (and whoever else thinks naturalistically these days –) in accordance with the dominant mechanistic stupidity which would have the cause push and shove until it “effects” something; we should use “cause” and “effect” only as pure concepts, which is to say as conventional fictions for the purpose of description and communication, not explanation. In the “in-itself ” there is nothing like “causal association,” “necessity,” or “psychological un-freedom.” There, the “effect” does not follow “from the cause,” there is no rule of “law”.

It seems to me that Evan Thompson (never heard of him, will look him up) is just making arbitrary distinctions between in this case a scientific model and a metaphysical proposition. I don't necessarily see anything particularly "wrong" about it, but i'm not sure how much the distinction helps in answering the question of free will. Perhaps you can help me understand how it does if you think it does. — punos

This isn’t an arbitrary distinction, it’s a crucial one when it comes to the issue of free will. He is saying that classical determinism is a social construction, rather than telling how nature ‘really’ operates.

↪Joshs
The apparent novelty that we see develop in macro states of organization was determined at the moment the seed pattern emerged from chaos. All the implications are inherent in that original pattern. All it takes is time to develop or evolve through pattern mutation and environmental selection. — punos

Would you agree with this by Evan Thompson?

“…it is important to distinguish between determinism as a feature of a scientific model and determinism as a metaphysical thesis about nature. According to the metaphysical thesis, all physical properties in nature are definite and determinate, and the evolution of the natural world is fixed uniquely. (The complete and instantaneous state of the world fixes its past and future with no alternatives.) This thesis hardly follows from the fact that we can construct nonstochastic dynamic-system models of observable phenomena.

Science has barely begun to chart this vast sea of nonlinearity and stochasticness. Within this context, "deterministic" seems best understood as describing certain nonlinear analysis techniques (those in which there are no noise terms), not as an ontological characteristic of nature (in a classical observer-transcendent sense).”( Mind in Life)

Yes, anything above the quantum level is classical and deterministic. At least that's how i see it. — punos

It has been argued that classical determinism is an arbitrary scheme which doesn’t allow for any true change or novelty. If evolutionary transformations are just outcomes of a template that could be run on a computer, they don’t address the nature of novelty. Insteadthey turn it into data spit out by a machine.

At any point in this chain had free will agents emerged then it would have disrupted the entire enterprise of higher order complexification. Things would deviate from the main pattern of evolution and fall into eventual catastrophic failure. Evolution is still doing it's work on us and we are not the final product, we are still larval at this stage, and any free will interference would compound into abnormal and imbalanced systems. — punos

Can this process of biological and cultural complexification be modeled in terms of the deterministically causal motions of objects in space (evolutionary arrangement and rearrangement of molecular patterns)?

So is free will.
— Joshs

Which is why I do not find debates about free will very enlightening. — Jackson

Me either. I like the approach of my favorite psychologist, George Kelly:

“…determination and freedom are two complementary aspects of structure. They cannot exist without each other any more than up can exist without down or right without left. Neither freedom nor determination are absolutes. A thing is free with respect to something; it is determined with respect to something else.
The solution proposed for the problem of determinism and free will provides us with the pattern for understanding how persons can vary and still be considered as lawful phenomena of nature. A person’s construction system is composed of complementary superordinate and subordinate relationships. The subordinate systems are determined by the superordinate systems into whose jurisdiction they are placed. The superordinate systems, in turn, are free to invoke new arrangements among the systems which are subordinate to them.
This is precisely what provides for freedom and determination in one’s personal construct system. The changes that take place, as one moves towards creating a more suitable system for anticipating events, can be seen as falling under the control of that person’s superordinating system. In his role identifying him with his superordinating system, the person is free with respect to subordinate changes he attempts to make. In his role as the follower of his own fundamental principles, he finds his life determined by them. Just as in governmental circles instructions can be changed only within the framework of fixed directives, and directives can be changed only within the framework of fixed statutes, and statutes can be changed only within the framework of fixed constitutions, so can one’s personal constructs be changed only within subsystems of constructs and subsystems changed only within more comprehensive systems.”

If free will exists , then does evil exist?
— Joshs

Evil is a theological concept. — Jackson

So is free will. Advocates of free will generally believe in some form of evil. Exceptions include
Daniel Dennett, but his notion of freedom, as laid out in his book Freedom Evolves, is compatible with that of many determinists and incompatible with that of typical free will advocates.

Yes. Which is always how I've lived my life. The deterministic model never made sense to — Jackson

If free will exists , then does evil exist?

I guess it does , but doesnt it substitute probabilistic for deterministic measurement?
— Joshs

Yes. Which is always how I've lived my life. The deterministic model never made sense to — Jackson

Does Quantum Mechanics Rule Out Free Will? According to this article, physicists are split on the issue.

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/does-quantum-mechanics-rule-out-free-will/#:~:text=%E2%80%9CIn%20quantum%20mechanics%2C%E2%80%9D%20she,Superdeterminism%20returns%20us%20to%20determinism.%E2%80%9D

What are these alternatives called? And again what is the basic concept in these alternatives that enable free will? How does that happen, is there an alternative to determinism and indeterminate randomness or chaos? Is there a third or fourth option that i'm not aware of? — punos

I’m thinking of such approaches as enactivism, phenomenology, postmodern perspectives like poststructuralism and hermeneutics.
Determinisms accept empirical models of causation based on determined characteristics or properties of objects. The post-deterministic approaches are radically interactional, meaning that there can be no such properties of objects that remain self-identical.

“Although modernists in psychology have attempted to cast the free will/determinism dilemma as either settled or irrelevant, it continues to enfeeble theory, therapy, and practice. The primary reason for this continuing enfeeblement is the modern dualistic framework for this dilemma: Either the will (choices, decisions, motives) is dependent on antecedent conditions and thus is determined or the will is independent of antecedent conditions and thus is free. This framework, however, is not supported by current research and practical experience, indicating that the will is inextricably connected to the past but is not determined by it.”

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0022167800401008

In essence my point is that free will is illusory. I — punos

Neither free will nor determinism adequately describes the human situation. Both options in fact cling to kinds of determinism.
Free will metaphysics assumes a self-consciously knowing subject whose choices are determined by this unitary ego. What you are calling determinism makes choices the product of causal laws. In both cases, the autonomous freely willing subject and the determined subject, the determinism is based on a preconceived notion of the self or the world.
Alternatives to the freedom vs determinism
binary assert that while we are determined by our history, both personal , biological and social, these don’t dictate future behavior in a strictly causal way because the future rewrites the past.

the brain's pain-pleasure system is, to some extent, uniform with respect to what induces pain and pleasure. — Agent Smith

The brain’s pain/pleasure system is correlated with the success or failure of anticipatory sense making. So the question is, how uniform is sense-making? The answer:

their antecedent causes differ from people to people, culture to culture, individual to individual — Agent Smith

I suppose what is happening here, Joshs, is the discussion where the idealist insists that it is words all the way down, while the realist points out that the words are about something that is not just words.

My own suspicion, in line with Davidson, is that both are roughly true. So my favourite quote from the very end of On the very idea of a conceptual scheme:

In giving up dependence on the concept of an uninterpreted reality, something outside all schemes and science, we do not relinquish the notion of objective truth -quite the contrary — Banno

If you like Davidson you might be interested in the work of Joseph Rouse, a rising star in the Pittsburgh school of philosophy. He begins with the Sellarsian distinction between the manifest image ( subjective conceptualization) and the scientific image ( empirical data) , and shows them to be intertwined in a more radical way than seen by Davidson, McDowell and Haugeland. His most recent book is Articulating the World:

“In contrast to traditional efforts to establish the epistemic objectivity of articulated judgments, Davidson, Brandom, McDowell, Haugeland, and others rightly give priority to the objectivity of conceptual content and reasoning. They nevertheless mis­takenly attempt to understand conceptual objectivity as accountability to objects understood as external to discursive practice. A more expan­sive conception of discursive practice, as organismic interaction within our discursively articulated environment, shows how conceptual nor­mativity involves a temporally extended accountability to what is at issue and at stake in that ongoing interaction.”

I am wondering if this paper is accessible? As in, can people still interested read the paper? I have an account on there, and it was free for me, but I had to actually use the academia portal rather than being able to find it through public search engines. — Moliere

I wrote a similar paper, available here in draft form:

https://www.academia.edu/38288335/Heidegger_Will_to_Power_and_Gestell

“If we examine Heidegger's treatment of Nietzsche's Will to Power in 'The Word of Nietzsche:" God Is Dead"' , (located in The Question Concerning Technology), it seems that Heidegger identified Nietzsche's thinking of self-transformation of values-structures as the last stand of metaphysics. Heidegger argues "The will to power is the ground of the necessity of value-positing and of the origin of the possibility of value judgment." "The principle of value-positing" comes out of the ground of Being as Will to Power. According to Heidegger's reading, particular value-structures become stabilized by the Will, and present themselves to the subject. This "constant reserve"(William Lovitt's translation, seemingly closely allied with 'standing reserve') belongs to the sphere from out of which the will to power wills itself.

Within this quote is all that I fear about idealism.

Note how every instantiation of idealism is also a tool of power. — Isaac

So we might have social constructions around pots, clay, even atoms, but the the distributions of those constructs will be bound by the parameters of the data from outside the Markov Blanket — Isaac

The split between internal representation and external reality that free energy models depend on amounts to a particular sort of idealism. It seems to fit Kant's own definition of empirical idealism:

“Idealism is the opinion that we immediately experience only our own existence, but can only infer that of outer things (which inference from effect to cause is in fact uncertain)” (Kant 2005: 294).

As Barrett writes “...concepts exist in your human mind that is conjured in your human brain, which is part of nature. The biological processes of categorization, which are rooted in physical reality ...are observable in the brain and body”.

“If you talk to a chemist, “real” is a molecule, an atom, a proton. To a physicist, “real” is a quark, a Higgs boson, or maybe a collection of little strings vibrating in eleven dimensions. They are supposed to exist in the natural world whether or not humans are present—that is, they are thought to be perceiver-independent categories. If all human life left this planet tomorrowsubatomic particles would still be here. But evolution has provided the human mind with the ability to create another kind of real, one that is completely dependent on human observers.”

“ Plants exist objectively in nature, but flowers and weeds require a perceiver in order to exist. Common sense leads us to believe that emotions are real in nature and exist independent of any observer, in the same manner as Higgs bosons and plants.”

Folk generally have little difficulty as to the distinction between clay, the stuff we make pots with, and "clay" the word we use to talk about clay. — Banno

I would hope not , because that distinction is presupposed by the way we use language in those situations.

↪Joshs Clay is dug out of the ground.

"Clay" is a socially constructed word; the stuff we dig up and make pots out of is called "clay".

This is a very important distinction. — Banno

Where and how do you draw the line here so as to be able to make the distinction you’re trying to make between what is constructed and what is prior to and independent of construction?

Sure, if you like. Communities construct cups out of clay. — Banno

And they construct ‘clay’ and ‘chemicals’ and ‘physical’.

Sure, numbers and so on have a reality that is not physical and yet not dependent on any individual mind. That's because they are constructed by communities of minds using language. — Banno

Is this also true of cups? Are they constructed by communities of minds using language? Is the word ‘physical’ then just one of these social
constructions?

The cup still has a handle, even when unobserved in the cupboard. — Banno

There are no teapots in Jovian orbit even though we have not made conclusive observations. There are aspects of reality that are the way they are regardless of their relation to mind.

Idealism is the converse of this view. Idealism holds that statements are true only in some relation to mind. It claims not just that we cannot know that the unobserved cup has a handle, but that there is no truth to the matter; not just that we cannot be certain that there are no teapots in Jovian orbit but that there the notion of truth cannot be applied to what is beyond consciousness. — Banno

Not necessarily. If we are expand the concept of idealism beyond Kant and neo-Kantianism ( and actually we wouldn’t need to do so in order to protect the form of realism that you embrace, since your realism is already a kind of idealism) we can incorporate forms of idealism that argue all of reality are ideas. But ideas dont require humans or mind or consciousness. Deleuze and Nietzsche argue this way. Idea is a creative differential
of forces imminent in all relations , whether animate or inanimate. This avoids the split between mind and matter.

When I think of the number 3, is there a pattern of synapses that fire in my brain that correlate to that thought? Is that pattern of firing synapses fairly consistent every time I think of 3? — Real Gone Cat

Why do you think of the number 3? What is the motivation, the context that frames the thought of 3? Isn’t it always slightly different? If I ask you to continue thinking the number 3, is that not the same as repeating a world over and over? Doesn’t the word begin to lose its initial sense? So my over overall
question is , is the sense of meaning of ‘3’ ever identically repeatable, and if not , would not the pattern of firing of neurons associated with the thinking of ‘3’ also change from in lstance to instance?

Personally, I see the issue as one of function over description. Both the mental event and the statement are functional, not descriptive. — Isaac

In the case of state vs function, description vs process, being vs doing , is it basically a matter of a temporally unfolding event ( or series of events ) rather than an instantaneous spatial pattern? And if so, can such a temporal sequence repeat itself more or less such as to be consistently identifiable as the same, and thus allow a something like a neural process to be correlated with a statement?

I don't think you understood Schopenhauer. Go back and get the vibe of it. Then come back and examine N. — Tate

Are you saying that Deleuze did not understand Schopenhauer?

Schopenhauer was a hard determinist, so there's no denying the Will in that sense. — Tate

What assumptions must be made about the nature of the will in order to argue that it must be denied in a Buddhist-like pose of nothingness? How can a hard determinism lead to that conclusion, and does hard determinism not presuppose metaphysical assumptions about the nature of the real?